Call of Duty was always a bit of a funny one for me. I’m frequently
in the mindset of “If everybody is going left, go right,” when it comes to
choosing what video games to buy and play, on the basis that I’m rubbish at
multiplayer modes and I don’t necessarily want a shared experience in a single-player
campaign. But at some point, in 2013, I decided to buy a Call of Duty game, and
with my almost OCD-like need to play games in sequence, I bought the first one
on Xbox live: Call of Duty Classic.
Six years later I beat it, and then had the much harder task
of reviewing it. When you review a game that’s more than a generation old, the
question is going to be: Is it still good today? And that was a question I
found very hard to answer.
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| The ubiquitous war-torn environments... |
The premise of this First Person Shooter game is that you
control three soldiers – an American, an Englishman and a Russian, which
straight away sounds like a bad joke – at various points of the latter part of
the Second World War. You’re thrust into chaotic and intense combat situations
and must run and gun your way through the level, with some support from a squad
in certain situations. There are usually mission objectives, which develop along
with the level you’re on. You’re provided with an arsenal of a sidearm,
grenades, and up to two small-arms weapons at a time, and it is up to you to get
to the end of the level and beat the campaign.
The game handles reasonably well; I was playing it with a
controller and the control scheme was becoming standardised at this point. Some
of the controls are a bit clunky – crouching then going prone is something that
is rarely employed – but overall the controls are fine. The levels are designed
for something approaching realism, which fits the theme of the game but creates
some rather cheap situations where you can be under fire, have no idea where it’s
coming from and be shot to pieces before you can react to a threat you had no
way of responding to. Yes, this is probably closer to the experience of being
in a battle than many other of Call of Duty’s contemporaries, and it doesn’t
derail the game entirely as there are checkpoints that save the game as you’re
going along. But it can feel cheap at times, and these situations are not much fun.
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| Stalingrad. Not exactly a holiday destination back in those days! |
The other problem you run in to when you’re going for realism
in design is that there’s not much variety in enemies. They’re Nazis, you shoot
them, and that’s about it. Some of them may have different weapons but other
than that there’s no sense of scale in the quality of the enemies you’re
fighting. There is some variation in tank and turret sections, but there’s usually
no climax to the levels, they just sort of end, and leave me feeling a little flat.
The graphics in Call of Duty are fine for the time, about as
good as any game in the 6th generation was ever going to get. They
haven’t necessarily aged well but you don’t play a game released in 2003 to ogle
the graphics engine! The sound is ok, with some reasonably competent voice-acting
from Jason Statham, and the guns have a nice kick to them.
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| The guy with the megaphone is warning the troops of what will happen if they desert... |
The multiplayer mode is non-existent in the Xbox 360 version
I was playing. Maybe it was a thriving community at some point, but no one
seems interested in playing it now. Call of Duty became the pinnacle of online
shooters later, so it would have been nice to experience its original form, but
it was not to be.
While Call of Duty: Classic is a competently-designed game
presented well with a full campaign, I can’t believe the franchise didn’t get
better later. The cheapness of some of the deaths and the lack of a functioning
multiplayer mode makes it very difficult to recommend this game at the end of
2019. If you’re interested in how this long-running series got started, give it
a go. But don’t spend any significant amount of money on it.
Final Score: 2/5: If you’re sure.
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